


Statement #0161218: Sacred Geometry

by BialystockAndBloom



Series: Peccate et Sapienter [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Original Male Character(s) - Freeform, Original Statement, Season 2, Statement Fic, The Spiral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 02:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22028200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BialystockAndBloom/pseuds/BialystockAndBloom
Summary: Statement of Dr. Tomas Dolenz, regarding the disappearance of his colleague, Dr. Isaiah Collins.
Series: Peccate et Sapienter [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588075
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Statement #0161218: Sacred Geometry

**Author's Note:**

> Just for reference, this is meant to take place after Helen Richardson's incident, but before Binary. Enjoy!

[Tape recorder clicks on]

ARCHIVIST

…as soon as I set this up here.

DOLENZ

Ohohoho, look at that! That takes me back! How old is that?

ARCHIVIST

Er… I, I can’t rightfully say. I think it’s just sort of been around at the Institute since before I got here.

DOLENZ

Is that a Magnavox? You know, I has one of those in the Nineties, but I don’t think I ever used it, to be frank. I got it for Christmas, and that was from my sister-in-law, Shelly, and she –

ARCHIVIST

Yes, yes, Dr. Dolenz, if you’d please…

DOLENZ

Oh, yes! The book. Right. So, it was –

ARCHIVIST

Oh, sorry, one moment. Statement of –

DOLENZ

Dr. Tomas Dolenz.

ARCHIVIST

…Dr. Tomas Dolenz, regarding the –

DOLENZ

PhD.

ARCHIVIST

Pardon?

DOLENZ

Dr. Tomas Dolenz, PhD. I have my doctorate, you know.

ARCHIVIST

…very well. Statement of Dr. Tomas Dolenz, PhD, regarding the disappearance of his colleague, Dr. Isaiah Collins. Statement taken directly from subject on 18 December, 2016. Statement begins.

DOLENZ

Right. I mean, the problems only really started when Isaiah brought that damn book in. He was always an odd bird, but then again – well, he was a professor of mathematics. The abstract stuff, too. Set theory, and all that, the stuff that I’d say is more well-defined nonsense than anything with a _real_ purpose. As much as I liked to give him guff over it, I didn’t really care. He was my best friend.

No matter though. I can’t give you the exact date he bought the blasted thing. He only told me he’d found it in a boot sale, alongside a few books on modernist architecture and a catalogue of knitting patterns. It was a small book, barely the size of a sheet of paper and under 200 pages long, and it was bound in an unremarkable blue cover. The title was printed on the spine in gold, but it had long since worn away. You had to open the book to the cover page to see its title – “A Treatise on Non-Associative Geometry in Non-Euclidean Spaces”, by C. L. Dodgson.

I know to the layman that may sound otherworldly, but I assure you, it’s not as frightening as it seems. All “non-associative” means is A times B isn’t necessarily B times A. It comes up all the time in my field, it’s a lot more common than you’d think. And then “non-Euclidean” isn’t nearly as bad as Lovecraft made it out to be, it’s really just anything that doesn’t lie on the plane, anything that can’t be flattened out quite right. The Earth is a non-Euclidean surface, for example – it’s why countries get stretched out on maps, but not on the globe.

If I had to guess what the book was about without knowing, I’d say… oh, I don’t know, something rather dull about the Hessian matrix, honestly. I never had any reason to suspect something more sinister.

He brought it with him to lunch, the first time I saw it. Both of our classes ended at 1:50, on the dot. We’d walk to the canteen together. We’d sit together. We’d talk together. He was my friend.

Right, sorry. He told me he was flipping through it, and the gist of the book was this: there are certain functions such that inputting A and B gives you a different result than inputting B and A – in other words, f(A,B) is not equal to f(B,A). But, since it’s also true that f(B,A) is not equal to f(A,B), then you can work on this weird transitive property where you can show that f(A,B) is not equal to f(A,B).

In short, it suggested that there are certain numbers which are not equal to themselves.

We had a good laugh about it, about how absurd it was. He said it should’ve been called “A Treatise on Non- _Reflexive_ Geometry”, and said that it would probably be a good example to show to secondary schoolers as to why the inequality relation is non-transitive. I asked if I could take a look at it, and he said “sure”.

I flipped it open to a random page, and, to my surprise, there was an illustration. It was a very simple drawing of a bird. But as I looked closer, I realized, no, that’s not what it was. It was a jumble of mathematical symbols. Its head, back, and tail were an integrand. Its beak was a “greater-than” sign. Its little feet were epsilons. It was cute, all in all. I’d probably buy it as a poster or something to hang in my office. But there was a caption underneath it, and it was worded so strangely that I remember it to this day.

It said, “And he cut the ties that bind flesh unto dirt.” Nothing more. I looked around the rest of the page, and it seemed like your standard maths textbook jargon. No context for it.

I asked him what he thought it meant, and he took the book back and stared at it for a bit. Then he muttered something I couldn’t quite make out, and shut the book. We went on with business as usual, after that, gossiping about whether or not Dr. Adeyoe was going to get tenured this year and whatnot.

After that, he began to grow… well, the only word I can think to use is “stranger”. I hesitate to say he grew distant or withdrawn, because he didn’t. Not at the start, at least. I still spent every lunch with him, and still talked with him, and still went drinking with him, but he was different. He would be taking notes all the time, and would never let me see them. I walked in on him in his office a few times to see him reading the book. He’d close it, and hastily hide it, and I’d make a joke like “this must have been how your mom felt when you went through puberty”, and we’d laugh about it. But I could tell that there was a genuine resentment behind the laughter. I knew that he was taking this book seriously, and that there was something in it he didn’t want me to see.

One day, as I was heading out for the evening, Isaiah ran up to me. He had this glint in his eyes like I’d never seen before. He implored that I come back to his office right away, that he’d “figured it all out”. I followed him, of course. Why wouldn’t I? I can’t say that I wasn’t intrigued by the book. Maybe there was some secret merit to it that wasn’t obvious at a first glance.

His blackboard was covered with just… nonsense. It was hundreds of lines of sheer nonsense. They had all the components of equations or formulae, but it was all gibberish. He’d arranged them carefully in these little lines, so carefully that I could see the marks in the chalk dust where he’d used a meterstick to make sure he was writing was perfectly straight. And they were arranged very meticulously in a grid pattern, filling up the whole board.

I just sort of stood there for a while, trying to make sense of what exactly it _was_ that I was looking at. He went on and on, talking about how he’d “cracked the code”. He kept saying that it was the form that mattered, not the substance. I finally asked him what he meant, and he gestured towards the board. He said that he didn’t know what the book meant before, but he understood it now. He said, in these exact words, “The book lets me _feel_ the maths. It lets me bend it. It lets me pull it through itself.” And then, he pulled something out of a drawer from his desk.

It was… truth be told, I don’t have the words to describe it. I don’t think there are such words. It was a chessboard he’d made out of paper, and he held it taut, so it was completely flat. Except it… wasn’t. It looked flat, and I knew it was flat, but I also saw that it curved up, its four corners touching. But it… no, it didn’t _curve_ up, it jutted up, at sharp right angles, but there were so many that it smoothed itself out, and… I just don’t know. It’s not that it was round and flat at the same time. It wasn’t round and had to be flat, but wasn’t flat and had to be round.

He approached me with it, excitement in his eyes, but I could only focus on the thing he held in his hands. He talked about how revolutionary it was and how it would change the very bases of mathematics as we knew it, but all his words bled together. Finally, I looked up at him, and I put my hand on his shoulder. I shook my head. When he asked what was wrong, I said the only thing I could think to say – “I don’t want to look at that anymore.”

He asked me why. I answered, “I don’t think I’m allowed to see it.”

All these years later, I don’t fully know what I meant by that. But I knew it was the truth.

He looked disappointed, and he put whatever… _thing_ he made back in his drawer. I apologized, only because I didn’t know what else to do. “It’s alright,” he said, bitterly. “I suppose not everyone can handle the unfiltered truth. Nobody appreciated van Gogh in his own time, and all.”

Then, I wished him the best of luck, apologized again, and just… left.

I just tried keep on keeping on with my life. I wasn’t going to interfere with whatever he was doing – what, was I supposed to go to Dean Bellwether and say, “Oh, just so you know, Dr. Collins has been constructing paper figurines that defy the laws of nature and God alike?”. No, of course not. So, I kept my head down, tried to forget about it, and prayed that that would be the end of it. To be honest, I tried to convince myself it was an odd dream, and I half-succeeded.

 _That_ is when I’d say Isaiah started to grow distant. I’d hardly ever see him. He stopped showing up to his lectures. I even heard a few complaints through the grapevine that when he did show up, he would be talking complete nonsense, on and on about “non-dissimilar vectortypes” or something. His students couldn’t understand any of it – something that I think was for the best. He grew haggard, and I’d see him wearing the same outfit for days on end, his hair matted and skin filthy from not showering. What little time I spent with him, he was quiet, reserved. He would be writing in his damned notebooks. He didn’t have the book on his person anymore – I figure he’d learned enough from it by that point to do… whatever he was doing without it as a guide. He always was a fast learner, I suppose.

I remember one day, I’d had enough, and I barged into his office. I was just… I was so lonely without him. Of course, there were other people in my department, but you need to understand that Isaiah was my best friend. Everyone knew we were. When he started to decline, everyone came to me for answers before anyone else. The graduating class of 1993 even had a plaque put on a bench where we used to sit and talk and argue and laugh together, to honor us. I felt so hollow, so incomplete without him by my side.

So, I confronted him. I told him… well, I told him basically what I just told you. I’m not ashamed to say that I started to cry as I gave him an ultimatum. I told him that he can’t stand with one foot out the door, that I didn’t want him to give me company just for the sake of habit or tradition. I wanted him to be my friend. I didn’t want his damned mind obsessing over this nonsense, and honestly, I was afraid.

I told him all that. There was a long, heavy silence that filled the air. Finally, he simply said, “Fine,” and he threw the book in the garbage can.

In the following days, he seemed to be getting better. We were talking and laughing again, looking over research papers, that sort of thing. I honestly thought that things were going to be fine. I suppose if they were, though, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.

The one odd thing I noticed was that he’d starting checking out anatomy textbooks from the library. He wouldn’t have his notebooks with him, or that little blue book, but he’d carry around these big, thick books on the nervous systems. I asked him why he had them, if he thought it was time for a sea change after thirty-some years of teaching math. He laughed, and said no.

“I just like to look at the pictures,” he said.

I think about that a lot. About what a fool I was for not thinking anything of that.

It was late when he called. It must have been around two in the morning. I… don’t remember what he said exactly. I’m not sure I want to. But I remember he wanted me to come to his office. Not his home, he made that clear – he wanted me to come to his office at King’s. He sounded so frantic, I felt like I had no choice but to do it. I never even thought of calling the cops. I just got in my car and drove.

When I got to the university, it seemed so… odd. It was dead quiet. Which I suppose you’d expect that late at night, but it felt like the whole place was dampened somehow. I couldn’t hear the traffic, or the buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead. Even my pounding heart seemed somehow muffled as I made my way to his office.

When I got there, I opened the door. Or, no… no, I didn’t open the door. The door was open, but I had to open it first. I remember thinking that very distinctly.

Dear God. I apologize, but I truly cannot describe what I saw in that office. You’ll have to pardon me if I have trouble finding the right words.

I think the best I could say was that he was scattered all over his office. I didn’t know where he began and the room ended. But then again, he was standing right in front of me, and he was sitting in his chair, and he was writing something on the blackboard, and he was dead and mangled in a thousand different positions, and he was still mangled but _alive_ and _writhing_ in another thousand ways. He – they – _it_ laughed at me, not menacingly, but in a laugh of recognition, one friend to another.

“I found another way,” he said.

“It’s remarkably easy once you know the patterns. I could do you next. You and I, Tomas – into mathematics itself. We can become the very beauty that we’ve spent our whole lives trying to comprehend.”

I looked on the blackboard, and through Isaiah I saw that it was covered in thousands, maybe millions, of little lines of that same nonsense maths. I now recognize the pattern as being that of a human’s nervous system.

He began to approach me, though really, I can’t say that truthfully. He… _spilled out_ of his office towards me. I didn’t know what to do. So, I screamed. I screamed, and I screamed, and I screamed, trying to push all of him away.

Quickly, he relented. I heard all of him sigh, I think. And then, he said, “Well, you could’ve just said ‘no’.” Then he chuckled, and went back in his office. He left the door open

That was the last thing he ever said to me.

I remember collapsing on the floor – not going unconscious, just falling. I stared vacantly at the floor. It felt like only seconds, but soon enough the sun had risen, and a member of the janitorial staff was grabbing my shoulders and asking what was wrong. I feebly tried to explain, but instead, I heard them let out a short scream themselves.

I followed them, in a daze. Dr. Collins’ office was open. Several of the windows had been shattered. The remaining panes were stained with trace amounts of blood. I think the official story was that Isaiah leapt to his death, and I went into shock.

I know that’s not what happened though. He leapt out the window, sure, but he didn’t die. I know this because while the janitor was calling 999 and panicking over the glass and blood, all I could focus on was the little bird drawn on his blackboard, its head, back, and tail an integrand, and its beak a “greater-than” sign.

He cut the ties that bind flesh unto dirt.

When they were clearing out his office, I took the book back. I said I wanted it to remind me of him, along with a few other knickknacks. Nobody questioned it.

It’s been a few years since that happened. In that time, I looked at the book twice, and only twice. The first time, was because I noticed a handwritten note poking out between the pages. The second time was when I brought the book here.

ARCHIVIST

What did the note say?

DOLENZ

“Whenever you’re ready, come join me.”

…what do you think?

ARCHIVIST

Pardon?

DOLENZ

What do you think? You believe me, don’t you?

ARCHIVIST

…Dr. Dolenz, at the Magnus Institute, it is our duty to consider the statements of those who seek our help, and then to investigate them to –

DOLENZ

Right, right, right. Bugger off.

ARCHIVIST

Wait, no! I… _yes_ , Dr. Dolenz. I believe you. We’ve had similar statements to yours, and while, of course, _officially_ we have to further look into it, I personally believe that what you said was true.

DOLENZ

…truly? Oh. Right, then. Ehm. Thank you. Here, take the book. Burn it for all I care. I just want to put this behind me.

ARCHIVIST

I’m sure you do. Here – allow me to walk you to the door.

[Tape recorder clicks off]

[Tape recorder clicks on]

ARCHIVIST

Unsurprisingly, underneath a seldom-used checkout card plastered on the inside cover is a Jurgen Leitner bookplate. I suspected as much as soon as I saw him carrying a book in with him. The book has been placed in Artefact Storage, and hopefully, it’ll be stuck in there for a long, long time.

Speaking of the book, Martin brought up something rather interesting – surprisingly. The author, one “C. L. Dodgson”, can be presumed to be _Charles Lutwidge_ Dodgson. Dodgson was a writer and logician from the 19th century, and given his works include titles such as _Euclid and His Modern Rivals_ and _Curiosa Mathematica_ , it would by no means be a stretch to attribute the text to him.

However, as Martin pointed out to me, Mr. Dodgson was not chiefly known for his mathematical work, but rather for his poetry, and his children’s stories. His most popular work, he published under a pseudonym – “ _Alice in Wonderland_ , by Lewis Carroll”.

I don’t buy for a single second that the author of _Alice in Wonderland_ of all things wrote this book. It must have been someone writing under his name, or perhaps even Leitner himself. We’ve seen a handful of popular books with these “alternate versions” from Leitner, and I see no reason to believe that this is anything else – an imitation made to lure people in for some sick purpose.

Beyond that, there hasn’t been a whole lot to follow up on. Tim got us a copy of the police report. As Dr. Dolenz said, the official story was that Dr. Collins was suicidal, called him over to his office, threw himself out the window, survived, and limped off somewhere unknown to die. They never found his body. I can’t really say one way or the other about how I feel about that. I suppose a few months ago, I’d take it as gospel and write off Dr. Dolenz’ account as the ramblings of a traumatized academic, but now… stranger things have happened, I suppose.

I’ve been keeping my eye on the doors around here. I made damn well sure that all the doors he went through were… well, _real_. The thought of another person, or another _thing_ out there like Michael frightens me, to be candid. Wherever Isaiah Collins may be – assuming he’s still alive – I hope he’s staying far, far away from Dr. Dolenz. And from us.

Recording ends.

[Tape recorder clicks off]


End file.
